We all have these moments in our lives where we give up. We get betrayed. Our child dies. We see something horrible. We just say, 'I have had enough here. I don't want to be alive'. And that is what I had to go back and reckon with, and say, 'Do you want to be alive, and if you do you have to pass through that fire and become a different person'. So much of my life was driven by that darkness. The part of me that was humiliated, that was self-hating, that had to prove myself. That's gone.

[on working with women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] The stories saturated my cells and nerves. I stopped sleeping. All the stories began to bleed together. The raping of the earth, the pillaging of minerals. The destruction of vaginas. They were not separate from each other or from me. The Congo threw me deep into the crisis of the world. [It] was where my life pinnacled. There was a coming together and a consciousness of what violence against women and femicide looked like. And these women had found ways to transform pain to power.

I have enormous rage. God forbid anyone take away my rage. It's part of the struggle.